A pair of Palestinian Muslim friends had already decided on their niche in 2020, as the world was upended and traumatized by the COVID-19 pandemic.
San Diegans Halima Said and Amira Abudiab said they began the nonprofit AMALY, which is Arabic for “my hope,” because they saw an urgent need for Muslim-centered, culturally responsive mental health care.
Then came this year’s mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego.
Doing the work
To be Muslim in America is to occupy a highly unique cultural space, one that can be simultaneously isolating and difficult to explain to those who are not Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent.
Compounding the issue is the fact that while Muslim therapists certainly exist, many do not advertise themselves as such, and Muslims seeking help often receive negative assumptions and criticism of their faith from non-Muslim therapists that can badly affect their mental health.
Co-founder Halima Said, also a licensed therapist and Muslim of Palestinian descent who grew up in Imperial Valley, said that while AMALY is intended for everyone, they specialize in therapy for the Muslim and Middle Eastern communities.
“Amira and I are both from the Muslim community in San Diego,” Said said. “[We] recognized there was a need.”
Said received her master’s degree from San Diego State University, where she was a graduate of the Community-Based Block Multicultural Community Counseling and Social Justice Education master’s program.
“I feel very passionate about bringing the work back to the community I grew up in,” said AMALY co-founder Amira Abudiab, 32. “I was ready to go into the field — really wanting to learn everything — so I could bring it to our community in a way that culturally made a lot of sense, and so I did a lot of training in severe mental illness.”
Abudiab is a licensed therapist who did much of her early work at crisis residential centers before opening AMALY with her friend Said.
“San Diego is also unique in that we get a lot of refugees as well,” said Abudiab. “People that are coming from war, needing to escape something… there’s a lot of trauma there.”
The ISAD mass shooting
The need for work such as AMALY’s was thrown into sharp relief by the mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, in which three community members were killed.
After the May 2026 shooting, the work became even more personal for the organization. Halima Said attends the Islamic Center of San Diego, and Amira Abudiab attended school there as a child. In the days after the attack, they hosted virtual and in-person therapy sessions for those affected, as well as healing circles.
That is another way that their beliefs set them apart as therapists. “We do healing circles, we do believe in collective healing.… For the most part we always try to be prepared to deal with a crisis,” added Said.
AMALY also specializes in suicide prevention, as suicidal ideation can vary by culture and is sometimes not recognizable to people outside it, as well as severe mental illness and cultural humility training to help non-Muslims understand the stereotypes, stigmas, and microaggressions often directed at Muslims.
“This training was created because other clinics would do Middle Eastern educational training on us, and I would sit in on those and think it was horrible because it spread more stereotyping,” said Said.
Then there’s the quotidian issues that come from simply living through 2026 in the United States, such as eating disorders or addiction, or mental illness. These are just as present in the Muslim community as they are everywhere else.
“We just don’t talk about it,” said Abudiab. “Most people from our community don’t utilize these resources.” Sometimes that is due to not understanding how the system works, she said; sometimes it’s due to a bad experience, and sometimes it’s pressure coming from within the community itself.
Virtual and in-person care
AMALY offers in-person therapy sessions as well as virtual ones. These are held at SDSU’s Center for Community Counseling and Engagement, or CCCE, in City Heights.
They offer three types of services: Individual and family therapy, workshops and training, and community and group sessions.
“And that is our way of trying to cover as much as possible,” said Abudiab.
The care they offer is also supported by the non-governmental organization Islamic Relief, providing resources that the organization has been unable to receive from San Diego.
“They’re the reason that we can give 80 sessions and support 30 families,” Said pointed out. “Islamic Relief was able to give us funding, which has been a struggle for AMALY for the past five years. We’re very grateful.”
AMALY also takes donations to support its work, which can be made here.
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